Achill Island

Irish Journal, after Heinrich Böll

In 1964, Böll said,
“You can recognize the humanity of a country by what ends up in its garbage bins.
By the everyday items, by what could still be used but is disposed of.
By the kind of poetry it throws away.
By what is deemed worthy of destruction”.

Poetry is one of the first things to end up in the trash cans when a country loses its freedom.

Early one morning I awoke to the haunting sound of a lone sheep, lost, perhaps, after a day with strong winds and heavy rainfall. Would it find its mates again? Achill Island’s landscape is enchanting and forever changing.

At the Minaun Bar, Mary, the welcoming publican tells me about her childhood memories of the Böll family (Böll would let her keep the change after filling up his car at the petrol pump outside the bar.

The Irish-German writer Hugo Hamilton describes the views from Böll’s cottage, ‘.. sometimes it is all blurred with rain… sometimes you can see for miles, right across the bay to the Mayo coastline…’

It is easy to get lost on this island, lost in the marshes, lost at night, lost in thought, lost in books or while gazing at Böll’s map of Achill in his former study.

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“the artist [as] a conduit through which lost things are recovered”.

Birds of Heaven (2005), Ben Okri

‘when everything connects, the challenge is to follow the strands to where they lead and accept what they say and where they take you’

Vera Frenkel

“Winckler’s work sings with love and art, and a delicacy and care that are rare and moving. She truly brings back to life some essence that had vanished. There is once again presence in the absence – in these haunting faces, their eyes dark and sunken, their expressions so recognisably and universally human.”

Julia has exhibited widely, including at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS (Retracing Heinrich Barth, 2008) and the Austrian Cultural Forum, London (Traces, 2012).

She is co-researcher on the SSHRC funded Children of the City: from street to playground (2013-2017), which mobilizes a collection of archival photographs of urban street scenes taken in Toronto at the turn of the last century and as part of this grant has co-curated an exhibition at City of Toronto Archives Gallery (2016-17), as well as Photographic Memories - Lost Corners of Paris: The Children of Cité Lesage-Bullourde opening on 8th March at the Alliance Française gallery in Toronto.

She works through layers of physical and cultural geography, history and memory, piecing together fragments that establish links between our collective past and present.

She is also an experienced arts facilitator, curriculum developer and lecturer.